by John Paul Helveston

Written: May 04 2020

Updated: September 01 2020

λέξις (lexis) is a theme for the xaringan R package for making slides. It has a light gray background with distinct coloring for code block inputs and outputs. The primary fonts are Fira Sans Condensed for headers, Overpass for body text, and SFMono-Regular for mono text (i.e. code). The theme copies ideas from several other themes, most notably from Allison Hill’s xaringan styling this workshop.

Demo

How can I use this theme?

If you’d like to use this theme, include the following in the YAML for your xaringan slides (the seal: false bit drops the defaul title page, I like to make my own, like I show in my demo slides).

---
title: "Title"
author: "Author"
output:
  xaringan::moon_reader:
    css: 'https://jhelvy.github.io/lexis/lexis.css'
    lib_dir: libs
    nature:
      highlightStyle: github
      highlightLines: true
      countIncrementalSlides: false
      ratio: "16:9"
    seal: false
---

What does “λέξις” mean?

When communicating an idea to others, there is a fundamental difference between the content of what is be communicated and the form of how it is communicated. Aristotle phrased this as the difference between λόγος (logos), the logical content of a speech, and λέξις (lexis), the style and delivery of a speech (see also this article on content versus form). Since the entire purpose of making a xaringan theme is to customize the form of how content is delivered, “lexis” seemed like an appropriate name.